New Threads
by Dame March Dolcetto
Summary: Lately, it seems like the Hero has holes in her memory with regards to the equipment she has and how she acquired them. In which the Inn at the Edge of Time has adverse side effects and the people outside are concerned.


**So I wanted to get back into writing. This was really meant to be a lighthearted humor piece but, uh... this is how it turned out. Figured I'd share it anyway. Either way, the Wings of the Unraveled are really cool and I headcanon them as at least partially sentient. The fact that you forget about what happens while you're in the Inn at the Edge of Time really struck me. Like... how the heck do you explain that? How do people exchange their gear for inn challenges? Fridge logic at it's finest. This is nowhere near "finest" in terms of quality but, at the very least, it's no less boring than watching paint dry.**

 **Enjoy!**

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When the Hero popped into town that morning, the first thing Ash noticed wasn't her flashy new armor or the bloodstains covering it. No, the first thing he noticed was her wings.

Now, wings weren't exactly uncommon as far as accessories went. Though most usually stuck to capes or cloaks, due to their also doubling as protection from the elements, wings were a decently common item of choice for adventurers. Even he owned a pair, an oversized angelic set with gilded golden feathers. They were so heavy, they kept throwing off his balance but good Lords, were they stylish. He was never going to wear again, of course, not after the incident with the giant's weighing scales, but they'd looked good while they lasted. He'd seen the Hero wear plenty of wings over the years herself, some feathered, some fae-like, some demonic, and so the fact that she was _winged_ didn't surprise him too much. What surprised him, however, was her _wings_. Not for their size (he'd seen bigger), nor for their color (he'd seen brighter), but because—

As the Hero bent to scratch her ankle, one enormous feathered wing rose to obscure her from view like a great white curtain _._

—They _moved._

"Morning, Ash," she said cheerfully as she noticed him, wings bending back, seemingly retreating into her silhouette as she walked over to him. "Got any mail for me?"

"Nothing today," he replied. Then, with some hesitation: "Pretty wings. Are they new?"

Her expression was blank. "What wings?"

See, this was what he was worrying about.

"Those wings," he said, tone as gentle and careful as he could modulate it to be. He reached out to the feathered wings sprouting from her back, settled and furled about her shoulders like a great mantled cloak. They seemed to recoil from his touch. "The... big feathery ones," he finished lamely.

She blinked uncertainly at him before reaching out to touch her back. One wing bent to meet her touch and she gave a start at the feel of them. "Oh, yeah... _these_ wings... " she said, as if only just now noticing the enormous white wings protruding from her bared back. As if in response to the doubt in their wearer's voice, they flexed outward and up, stretching to reveal a wingspan at least twice her height, all in feathers that shone white-gold in the sunlight. They looked pretty impressive, he had to admit, and he noticed more than one passerby stop to admire them. "They're nice, yeah," she said, at last. "They... definitely feel stronger than my old Paragon cape."

Up until today, she'd sported a tattered but powerfully enchanted gray cloak rather reminiscent of the Mysterious Stranger's cloak. (It wasn't the _actual_ thing, though. He got his Princess to check. Only out of concern, of course). Just like with the wings on her back, she hadn't realized she was wearing it until someone else had pointed it out to her, though, unlike these wings, that cape never moved except in the wind.

"That's nice," he said carefully. "Where did you get them?"

Just like the dozens of times he's asked that question before, he asks it very, _very_ cautiously. He'd read somewhere that it could be dangerous trying to jog an amnesiac's memory.

"I..." Her expression briefly crumpled before, after looking briefly to the skies, brightening. "I forget the exact place but let me check my notes."

Because that was what she was when it came to her equipment these days. An amnesiac. The last time she'd outright told him where she found some piece of equipment without needing to check any sort of notes was when she was showing off the daggers she'd pulled out from some sea serpent's maw. And that was weeks ago; she'd had to look through her notes for every new piece of equipment since.

She drew out a little notebook from somewhere (where _did_ she keep her backpack?) and rifled through to where her bookmark was. Her expression cleared after a few moments of reading.

"I got it as a prize from a fight," she said cheerfully. "Not a hard one, per se, but kind of frustrating."

"Where?"

"From the usual place," she said evasively. "Where I get all of my stuff. Did you want to read my notes?" She added, noticing his expression. "I won't mind."

He shook his head. Her notes, while interesting enough, had never given any clues as to whatever was up with where she was getting her gear. He'd seen for himself. She'd let him read them whenever he asked. The contents were fairly normal, filled in with lines and lines of text in her trademark chicken-scratch scrawl, surprisingly neat rows of math equations, and doodles stuffed in the margins. Aside from an enchantment ensuring that she'd never run out of pages, the notebook itself was nothing special. It was exactly what you'd expect from an adventurer's private notes. That only made it more suspicious.

"How was it frustrating?" he asked, trying his best to sound curious rather than concerned as he watched her flipping through her notes, noting the now-depressingly familiar expression on her face. Up until last year, she had never had to consult a notebook just to remember where she'd gotten a piece of gear. He can even remember how, back then, he only had to point to a piece of gear to get her to tell him how she got it, whether it was through a quest spanning months of her time, an irritating trip to the auction house, or even just a commission from a blacksmith. He watches now as her brow furrows as she stops at a specific page, one hand reaching to touch the wings at her back as if disbelieving their existence. _'Oh, that's how,'_ he hears, without her having to say it. _'I forgot.'_

"The guy hit like a truck but it wasn't very smart," she read absently. "Cryptic dealt with it simply enough. I merged these wings from some thread it left behind when it died."

Behind her, her wings flexed forward, throwing her off balance. Somehow, it looked to him like they wanted her to preen.

"What was it called? The thing you killed, I mean?"

"The Unraveler," she said distractedly, now trying to force the wings back behind her. They didn't bend one inch. "Big white moth thing. These wings—I'm calling them Wings of the Unraveler."

"Good name," he said, with the best smile he can muster as he tried to commit all of that to memory. So far, from what he'd read and what she'd said, she'd been getting her equipment from either somehow stronger versions of past enemies or old fairy tales come to life. During one of their meetings on her weird equipment situation, Symone had proposed that the fights were hallucinations and the equipment, given by some form of eldritch entity in exchange for... something or the other, anyway. He was finding it more believable with every new bit of gear, though he knew Aria favored Artix's theory that they were gifts by some kind of lord over time, the fights also being some form of reward (she did like a challenge every now and then, they all knew). Regardless of whichever proved true, he would have to inform the rest of the Hero's unofficial but very concerned group of protectors that she had new gear again and hadn't noticed until someone else asked.

"Seemed obvious," she said, shrugging. The wings bobbed along with the slight movement. Having just spent several fruitless minutes trying to force them into position, seeing them move made her eyes narrow and look to the wings with a mix of curiosity and irritation. "They're a bit..." She flexed her shoulders forward then back, looking rather displeased when the wings didn't follow the movement. "... Stiff though."

One wing then promptly whapped her over the head. It didn't look like it hurt but it definitely... ruffled her feathers. She looked annoyed.

"I can see that," he conceded, trying not to smile at least a little. At the very least, he noted, these wings, despite obviously able to move on their own, didn't seem to be hurting her. Not physically, anyway. Or, well, not in any obvious, physical way. It could be corrupting her invisibly via magic or whispering poisonous thoughts into her ears or slowly draining her life force but at least it didn't look like she was in danger of getting beaten to death by her own wings.

... He really was getting paranoid, wasn't he?

"Wings aside," she said huffily once her wings settled down. "I was just about to head out to clear the coral reefs. The eels are getting unruly and I've been meaning to test this new armor. Do you wanna come? I'll be making unagi rolls afterwards."

If this had come at any time other than directly after he'd seen her with some new piece of gear that she didn't fully remember getting, he would've said yes in heartbeat. As it was...

"It's fine, don't worry," she said quickly, flashing him a smile. "I can handle them just fine on my own. You have plans?"

"Something like that," he murmured, looking away. Her new armor gave her eyes an odd, iridescent gleam but it was the trust and understanding in them that he couldn't bear to look at. Despite her being a rogue, she'd always been very honest with him. Knowing that he wasn't exactly returning the favor didn't sit well with him, moreso given the irony that it was he, the ArchKnight _,_ who was being sneaky instead of the skilled rogue who was his friend. This was for her sake, he reminded himself. "I'm communing with my Princess today," he said. "The weather's perfect for it."

Her smile widened and he tried to suppress a twinge of guilt. "That sounds nice," she said cheerfully. "Tell her I said hi. Do you want me to bring you anything?"

He shook his head. "Nope," he replied. "Though I wouldn't say no if you left some unagi rolls for me," he felt like he had to add. Despite expectations, she was actually an excellent cook. According to her, it came from all the camping she'd had to do. "Aside from that, I wish you the best of luck."

The minute her back was turned, even before she'd completely left his sight, he got into action.

"New item," he hissed into a fold of his cloak, where a communication device had been sown in, as it had been in the weeks after all the confusion with her equipment started. In his experience, if he recorded his message now, he'd get their replies tomorrow, at the latest. "I repeat, she has a new item. She's been calling them Wings of the Unraveler. They're big and angelic and they..." he hesitated for a moment. "They move on their own. They seem like they might have a mind of their own—though they haven't tried to hurt her yet or anything," he had to add. "She didn't remember how she got it either, at first. Her notes say she got it from something called the Unraveler, this big white moth thing. She mentioned it wasn't a hard fight, though. Now guys..."

Here, he paused, both to simply catch his breath and to gather his thoughts into position. At the other end of the line were his fellow allies, bound by concern over her odd equipment situation. A full dozen, at the very least, several hundred at the absolute most.

"Stay on guard," he said, at last. "This feels different. The wings seem to be alive and I don't know what the want. If any of you find anything, call someone right away. We'll get to the bottom of her memory issues sooner or later."

The sooner, the better, he thought to himself and he knew most of his allies in this would agree, from Mazurek, to Symone, and even to the Hero's odd Rose friend, Raven.

Even though all of them had their own goals, of which some were conflicting, all of them were hugely concerned over the Hero's situation. She wasn't exactly known for having a good memory but forgetting where she got a piece of equipment every time she got a new piece of equipment was a bit much, even for her. And all the gear she'd been sporting lately had been nothing less than top class and you had to wonder just where a person could get such good gear on a regular basis and yet still keep forgetting that she'd been there.

Once she started going there (wherever that was) every weekend, it only got more suspicious. While coming home injured was pretty standard among adventurers, the extent to which she was injured did more than raise a few eyebrows. It raised quite a lot of concern, actually, as well as outcry. The first time she'd teleported home looking like she was a sneeze away from dying, more than one citizen of Falconreach rushed to offer her potions, himself included, with Twilly nearly throwing himself at her in his rush to have her healed. Her injuries healed quickly, none of them having been particularly complex, but the extent had just been extreme. And she somehow had no idea how she'd gotten them, only that, according to a note written in her handwriting, she "ought to grab her ancient dragon scythe if she wanted to get the drop on the weird duo" and that "a Hero's Diet could make things easier but seemed kinda overkill".

That wasn't even the worst of them. Even now, he still remembered that weekend when she kept teleporting in from out of nowhere, covered in injuries graver than anything a person could've gotten from the usual quests from around town, absolutely refusing to answer any of his questions or offers to help in favor of either dashing in and out of the bank or over to her house to change armors (for the umpteenth time), then teleporting back to where it was she came from only to repeat the cycle once more, following increasingly more frantic notes as she did, over and over and over again. The last time hadn't been all that comforting either. He still remembers how she walked up to him directly after her Teleport Home spell brought her to the Inn's doorstep, her clothes as Ranger torn and stained, a massive gash on her shoulder dripping blood, but her expression triumphant as she brandished an odd ring made out of some kind of chitin, a loop that looked that it was made out of a tentacle, and, somehow, a baby chimera, for all of Falconreach to see.

"SEE!" He remembered her having screamed at no one in particular. "I told you I could do it!"

"What happened?!" he remembered demanding, more concerned than alarmed. Which, as it turned out, would become his standard operating procedure where his friend, the Hero, was concerned, especially in times like this. "What did you do?"

He still remembers how she looked at him dead in the eye, her gray eyes a manic blue in the stark sunlight, before telling him, with deathly seriousness:

"I killed a squirrel."

One half-minute of confused questioning later, she then forgot about any sort of incident regarding squirrels. As in, mid-sentence, she forgot about ever having killed a squirrel that day. She then questioned him on how her time-strapped egg hatched and where the ring and necklace she was currently wearing came from.

... He and Twilly then managed to convince her to go to bed early, where Gaelan made her some soup and hot chocolate. She was mostly back to normal the next morning, newfound all-consuming hatred for squirrels and similarly newfound addiction to nori and hardtack aside.

He wasn't the only one to have noticed. Nythera, Zhoom, Mazurek, Rhubarb, Artix, Symone... just about all of them have since become concerned about it all. His friend might've made mistakes in the past but there was no way in all of the underworld that he or any of them was going to let her get possessed or entranced or comatose or imprisoned or killed or absorbed or driven to insanity by whatever was causing all this trouble. They all swore they were going to get to the bottom of this equipment situation if it was the last thing whatever was causing it did, even if they had to go to the absolute end of the world himself.

Even if all of them had to, they would.

-omake(?)

Meanwhile, by the reefs, an adventurer had just swum back to shore, having finished her quest in five minutes. The skies overhead rumbled and grayed and -

"Oh, it's raining..."

Without any warning, both wings stretched out from her back, one wrapping about her like a scarf, the other curving upward to form a makeshift umbrella against the rain.

"Okay... that was pretty cool. Can you do other things?"

It was there, by those reefs, that a Hero struck a beautiful friendship with an accessory

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 **Hope someone's found some enjoyment in this... reviews are always hugely appreciated.**


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